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The tools I use to take a brand from first sketch to shipped, in 2026. 🔥
Pen and paper first, and the brief written back to you before I open anything.
Illustrator and InDesign for identity and print. Figma and Stitch for interfaces. Photoshop and Higgsfield for images. After Effects, Premiere Pro, Rive and Spline for motion and 3D. HTML, CSS, JS and Python, with an AI coding assistant, for builds.
✅ One rule across all of it: AI renders the context, never the mark. Your logo, type and layouts are drawn by hand.
What that means for you: one designer from the brief to the shipped files, so nothing gets lost between handoffs.
Need a brand, a product or a launch? My DMs are open. 💬
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Three illustrated cards from Nova Quinn explain the creative process. Each step has an image and a short description.
Framer template: https://startfrom.co/templates/nova-quinn
love this illustration style 😍
Illustrations came as a game changer in design. But I still thought how to get inspiration for them
Dan Holdsworth and Luke Allen ship brands as a code ready repo.
The handoff includes global CSS, a clip JSON file, an agent file, and a human-readable README. Clients drag and drop it into their codebase and the brand is operable from day one.
They started doing this because clients kept improvising after handoff. A PDF gets opened once and forgotten. A repo stays in the codebase as a source of truth.
The thinking matters. The handoff is the start of the brand's life in production. If the system breaks the first time someone extends it, the design work didn't finish.
They also talked about taking only two projects at a time, catching a logo that sat too close to a Pinterest reference and redoing it the same day, and the difference between cheap and affordable when you raise prices.
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl0Q2Xjw1Ao
AI is an analytical tool it doesn't have tast or creative intelligence or emotional intelligence it will never be better than humans in that because it has no emotions or creativity